1. Cut my usual portion size. I cut my portion sizes in half on each of my meals.
2. Vary it up. While I was getting myself ready to eat every two hours, I started by eating two completely different half portion meals right in a row. So, if I would normally have a bowl of grilled chicken salad for lunch and an apple and peanut butter for a snack between lunch and dinner, I ate a half bowl of grilled chicken salad and half an apple with peanut butter.
3. Start to spread the time. I took my double meals and started separating them by an hour. So if I started breakfast at 9AM, I had my first half meal at 9AM and my second at 10AM. If I usually had my lunch at 1PM, I lunched at 1PM and 2PM. Dinner at 6PM and 7PM. I started pushing to two hours after that.
4. Drink All of The Water. Water helped me stay satiated between meals, helped me absorb nutrients from my meals, and occasionally made me feel full because what I really needed when my body wanted food was hydration.
5. Write it down. It's sometimes really helpful to write down what meals I can make for myself in advance so I don't suddenly become starving and need to eat a huge portion or something unhealthy/quick to fix the crash I'm suddenly feeling.
6. Add snacks. As I continued to spread the time out, I started adjusting what type of mini meal I was going to eat at a given time. If I wasn't ready for a full on mini-meal at a given two hour block, I switched in a snack. I defined snack as anything that contained nutrients without variety. So a stick of string cheese was a snack. A handful of nuts was a snack. A banana was a snack. String cheese with a handful of grapes was a mini meal. Sliced banana with peanut butter on bread was a mini meal. Etc. Snacks became extremely important to me if I was out in a car for the day, unsure when I'd be able to get my next proper meal in. I have a totebag full of a variety of snacks with me at all times.
7. Equalize or redistribute my portions. Once I was on this schedule, the common diet in the US of eating much more food in the evening than throughout the day didn't work for me. I would wake up starving after 8 hours of sleeping without eating and I'd be pretty full toward the end of my day. So I made my early meals heartier and my evening meals a little lighter or smaller.
It took me about two weeks to adjust but I would say I would have needed a full month to adjust if I was eating three meals a day prior to my pregnancy. Now Baby B and I have a constant, varied supply of the nutrients we need to get through our day and stay healthy and strong.
